Existence of Market Equilibria for Grid Computing

Abstract

Grid computing has emerged as an effective mechanism for allocating globally available surplus computational capacity to applications whose requirements exceed local capacity. It is often viewed as a commodity exchange with additional grid computing specific constraints that may arise due to requirements on multiple resources (e.g., disk space) in addition to computing power. These constraints are related to complementarity and substitution effects among resources, and significantly alter the assumptions typically used for demonstrating the existence of market equilibrium. However, prior work in grid computing has simply assumed that market equilibria exist. Our work fills this gap by studying the existence of market equilibrium under the grid computing environment. To do so, we first establish an economic framework that incorporates the grid computing specific constraints into a commodity market. We next derive some intuitive necessary conditions based on the computing requirements of individual agents. We finally establish the existence of regular markets as a competitive equilibrium, given that these necessary conditions are met and that the agents' utility functions satisfy some minimal requirements. In the process, we also show existence of competitive equilibrium for the special case of grid computing as a pure exchange economy 1 .